“For too long, people with disabilities have been relegated to the margins of society,” exclaimed Megan O’Neil, Access to Assets Project Coordinator at the World Institute on Disability (WID). “Asset-building programs give people the support, selfconfidence, and opportunity to become economically self-sufficient and truly integrated into society.”

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Lessons from the First Year of the W.K. Kellogg Entrepreneurship Development Systems in Rural America Project

Welcome to the learning network website for the W.K. Kellogg Rural Entrepreneurship Development Systems (EDS) project.

This learning network website is a portal to access research and resources about rural entrepreneurship and creating entrepreneurship development systems. It is by no means a comprehensive source, but will point you in the right direction to explore what's out there. Some of the resources you will find on this website are the products of other rural entrepreneurship stakeholders, but many were created by the six collaboratives funded by Kellogg to develop Entrepreneurship Development Systems (EDSs) in their regions.

To commemorate its 75th Anniversary, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is leading a multi-million dollar project to foster entrepreneurship across rural regions of the country. The Foundation contracted with CFED to conduct research on the state of rural entrepreneurship development and to assist in identifying statewide and regional collaboratives that show potential for creating rural Entrepreneurship Development Systems. The Foundation has chosen six grantees for investments of $2 million each.

The six grantees are:

• Empowering Northern New Mexico Business Spirit Initiative (EBS Initiative), serving Northern New Mexico counties, pueblos, and tribes.
• Connecting Oregon for Rural Entrepreneurship, serving Lake County, Lincoln County, Northeast, Southwest, and North Central Oregon.
• Oweesta (SAGE) Collaborative, serving Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River reservations of South Dakota (Lakota Sioux), and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming (Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapahoe).
• Home Town Competitiveness Collaborative, serving 15 counties in Nebraska and the Winnebago, Omaha, and Santee Sioux Indian reservations.
• Advantage Valley EDS Collaborative, serving eight counties in West Virginia, Boyd and Greenup counties in Kentucky, and Lawrence county in Ohio.
• North Carolina's Rural Outreach Collaborative, serving 85 rural counties of North Carolina, including seven rural Indian Tribes.

This website is meant to be a place for sharing lessons learned, improving efficiency by reducing duplication of effort, and capturing best practices around the implementation of Entrepreneurship Development Systems.

To share documents or suggest what else you'd like to see on this website, please contact Kim Pate.

CFED is a nonprofit organization that expands economic opportunity. We work to ensure that every person can participate in, contribute to, and benefit from the economy by bringing together community practice, public policy, and private markets. We identify promising ideas; test and refine them in communities to find out what works; craft policies and products to help good ideas reach scale; and foster new markets to achieve greater economic impact.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to apply knowledge to solve the problems of people. Its founder W.K. Kellogg, the cereal industry pioneer, established the Foundation in 1930. Since its beginning the Foundation has continuously focused on building the capacity of individuals, communities, and institutions to solve their own problems.